HTC and Verizon Wireless have released the best Android phone so far with the Droid Incredible.

The Droid Incredible by HTC is an absolutely amazing device. The most powerful phone on the U.S. market today, it reflects and enhances the state of the art smartphone, with the full backing and support of the Verizon Wireless network. It's our obvious Editors' Choice for Verizon Wireless smartphones and one of our 10 best touch-screen cell phones.

The Incredible is yet another slab phone, but it has some interesting touches; for instance, the inside of the phone is painted red. The Incredible's body is primarily contoured, soft-touch plastic, with a large 3.7-inch, 800-by-480 OLED touch screen on the front. At 4.63 by 2.3 by .47 inches (HWD) and 4.6 ounces, it's about as big as its major competitors, such as the iPhone 3GS ($199-$299, ). Below the screen, there's an optical mouse taking the place of a track ball. The 8-megapixel camera is on the back; somewhat disappointingly, there's no dedicated camera button, although it does have power and volume buttons on the top and side of the phone. Snap off the cover to replace the microSD memory card without replacing the battery.

The 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor makes the Incredible feel fast and smooth. The hypersaturated OLED screen will cause some controversy, though. HTC used the same panel as on the Google Nexus One ($179.99-$529.99, ), and as we found in tests with the DisplayMate diagnostic suite, the Nexus One's colors are over the top. Now, some people love that kind of Technicolor-esque display, and the blacks are really black, so there's definitely a taste issue involved. The screen also has the typical OLED problem of being way too reflective in sunlight, though not to the point of being unusable for basic tasks. BlackBerry phones and the iPhone both perform much better in sunlight.

The Incredible is a very good voice phone. Reception was about on par with the Motorola Droid ($199.99, ). Voice quality in the earpiece was great; loud and clear, but not too loud, with just barely noticeable in-ear feedback of my own voice while I was talking. The phone's microphone transmitted more background noise than I would like, but my voice was still audible and comprehensible on the other side. The speakerphone is strong enough for general use, though transmissions through the speakerphone were a bit echoey.

The phone worked easily with an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, ) Bluetooth headset. The one real sour note in voice calling was that there's no way to activate or use voice dialing over a Bluetooth headset; it only works over the phone itself or a wired headset. Battery life, at 5 hours and 49 minutes of talk time, was on par with other top smartphones. Just like with a Motorola Droid or iPhone 3GS, I found that if I started at 7 a.m. and used the phone's Internet features frequently, the phone's battery was struggling by about 7 p.m.; if you need better battery life, you have to get a BlackBerry.

Incredible Apps
I'm no fan of the basic Android user interface; I think it's a bit too cold and spare, relying too heavily on tech-savvy users to configure it. So I love what HTC has done here. HTC's Sense UI improves everything about the Android experience, but most notably it makes your default home screen somewhere you'd actually want to hang out. The Incredible's home screen starts with a beautiful, animated, transparent weather graphic; flick left and right to find full-screen photo contacts, e-mail and social networking pages, along with the ability to see all of your customized home screens at once. As you get more comfortable with Android, obviously you'll fidget with thingsthat's what Android is aboutbut the Incredible gives you a great experience even in its default state.

HTC loaded a bunch of useful software on here. Its own Exchange client syncs e-mail, contacts, and calendars. Peep is a good-looking Twitter client; FriendStream merges Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook update feeds. I like HTC's address book better than Google's; like the default address book, HTC integrates Facebook into your contacts as well. There's a desk clock mode, a car mode, and Google's free GPS navigation software, just like on the Motorola Droid. Navigation looks even better here than on the Droid, though, because of the slightly bigger screen.

Performance benchmarks came out similar to but slightly slower than another leading Android phone, the Nexus One; all that Sense is taking an invisible toll on performance. But the Incredible is still considerably faster than the Droid, and for that matter than all other Android phones on the market right now.

Web surfing went smooth and fast in the new Android 2.1 browser, which has pinch-zoom and automatically reformats columns of text to your screen width. Since this is Android, you can also load Dolphin (Free, ) or Opera Mini if you like, and even set them as your default browser. There's very limited Flash support, but Adobe says they're working on a full Flash 10 interpreter. The phone connects to Verizon's CDMA Rev A network, and also to 802.11b/g Wi-Fi networks; I got download speeds over 2 Mbps on Verizon's network using speedtest.net. For an extra $15-30 per month, depending on your data plan, you can tether the Incredible to your laptop via a micro USB cable and get those speeds as a PC modem.

Entering e-mail wasn't a problem on the two virtual keyboards, and Gmail and Exchange both push to the phone. Twitter and Facebook don't, though; instead the phone picks up new Tweets and messages periodically. You can update Tweets every five minutes, but you can't set Facebook's update period to less than an hour, which I found frustrating.

Noticeably missing is anything that could be considered bloatware; there isn't a single app with a Verizon logo or tie-in on here by default. Instead, Verizon tucked their visual voicemail, NFL, Skype and other apps into an optional channel in the Android Market. That's a level of thoughtfulness and consideration for the user that I'd love to see AT&T duplicate.

The Incredible's biggest problems as a smartphone aren't Incredible problems, they're Android problems. Android's Market is still way behind Apple in terms of the number of high-quality apps, a problem made much worse by Android's awful fragmentation; there are phones running four different versions of Android out on the market. Yes, Android has some entire categories of apps, like console game simulators, that the iPhone lacks. What Android is missing is big, brand-name apps from major publishers; most noticeably, I couldn't find a single big-name 3D game for this phone. That's shocking. App development is way behind the capabilities of the hardware here.

Incredible Multimedia
The Incredible is a very good multimedia phone, though maybe not quite as good as it's billed to be. Like with all Android phones, you have to choose one of several poorly-explained options to sync music and video over to the phone; I prefer to use the free program DoubleTwist (Free, ), which worked perfectly and even synced iTunes playlists. You can load files into the 8GB of internal memory or on a microSD card (not included)my 16GB card worked fine.

Music in pretty much every unprotected format sounded very clear through wired headphones plugged into the 3.5mm headphone jack, and even through Plantronics Backbeat 903 Bluetooth headphones. The Incredible's video player is confusingly part of the photo gallery; I found MPEG4 simple profile videos at up to 640-by-480 resolution played smoothly, but WMV and H.264 videos had varying troubles. Videos played over Bluetooth headsets kept their lip sync, though. There's an FM radio built in if you're living in 1985.

The Incredible's 8-megapixel camera, unfortunately, shows many typical camera phone flaws. Shutter speed is refreshingly fast at 0.3 second, and there are lots of options, including manual ISO, metering mode, and tap-to-focus. But except for sunlit, outdoor, daylight shots, my other photos appeared noisy at best and outright blurry at worst. The dual-LumiLED flash was bright, too bright in fact. It ended up over-exposing faces. The phone also defaults to a confusing 6.3-megapixel "widescreen" mode that claims to be 8 megapixels, but isn't; to get the true 8 megapixels, you need to manually switch to non-widescreen.

I was much more impressed with the Incredible's video recording. The phone's video recording mode captures usable 800-by-480 videos at 25 frames per second, or 640-by-480 videos at 30 frames per second; they didn't have noticeable artifacting or major problems.

Conclusions
The Incredible is the best smartphone on Verizon, and the second-best smartphone in America; it would outpace the iPhone if it weren't for all of those great iPhone apps. The Incredible renders the upcoming Nexus One for Verizon's network totally irrelevant, although it may yet be outmatched by Sprint's upcoming, WiMAX-based Evo 4G.

That said, there's still a reason to get a different Verizon smartphone if you want or need a hardware keyboard. In that case, the Motorola Droid beckons, and it's still an excellent phone. If you're really all about messaging, and you want a great hardware keyboard but don't care that much about apps, the BlackBerry Tour ($269.99, ) is for you. But if you've been holding out for something like an iPhone on Verizon, head over and pick up an Incredible today.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

Droid Incredible by HTC (Verizo...

Droid Incredible by HTC (Verizon Wireless)

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